Rest Days: Train Less, Get StrongerRest and never reach the point of diminishing returns.

I met a kid/man/something online while playing a popular video game under the name of Starcraft 2. In case you are not aware, Starcraft 2 is 1v1 war. You make units and try to kill the other guy while using some sort of strategy.

Anyway, I played with this kid/man/something and won. Then, the kid/man/something contacted me via chat and said: “Fuck you! I am better than you.”

It turned out that the kid/man/something was playing this game for hours every day. He wanted to reach the so-called masters league. (In this game, people are divided into different leagues depending on skill. The highest two are the master league and the grandmaster league.)

I looked at the play history of my opponent and saw that he plays all day. Starcraft 2 was basically eating his life and causing extreme harm to his personality. He’d become a slave to a game.

This is when the lifter in me reported the obvious – my opponent was not resting enough. As a result, he was losing too much. Fatigue always comes with mistakes.

I told him to play less in order to preserve his nervous system and joints (forearms, shoulders, fingers, wrists…etc.)

After about 2 months the kid/man/something contacted me and said that he’d become a master by reducing his play time by 2/3. He was playing only when he was fresh, rested and strong.

Rest is a fundamental part of the lifting game too. The only way to get stronger is to recover from your workouts. Regardless, many people ignore this advice and hit it hard hoping that more work will give them faster and better results.

It’s true that more efforts produce more gains, but sooner or later, you will reach the point of diminishing returns.

Imagine that you are trying to become a better piano player and practice 20 minutes a day. If you increase that number to 2-4 hours a day, you will most certainly see faster results. However, if you up your practice session to 12-14 hours every day, there is a pretty good chance that you will burn out very quickly. Every extra hour will cause more fatigue, poor concentration, and frustration.

Adding more exercises and workout days when the bases are already covered works against you.

Sometimes in life, the challenge is not to do more, but to learn how to do nothing at all.